Family Violence: Interpretations and Solutions

Abstract

In the last two decades we have gradually become aware of the phenomenon of family violence (see Freeman, 1979a). Child abuse was the first aspect of the problem to surface to public attention. The earliest discoveries date from the late 1940s but it was H. Kempe’s address to the American Academy of Paediatrics in 1961 which first attracted major attention to the problem (Kempe, 1962). The earliest sociological and psychological studies date from the mid-1960s (Elmer, 1967; Young, 1964). Wife abuse ‘arrived’ a decade later. It had previously been seen as a problem in the mid-nineteenth century: Erin Pizzey’s work in Chiswick and her book Scream Quietly or the Neighbours will Hear (Pizzey, 1979a) plus the fact that a women’s movement was active were largely instrumental in bringing it again to public attention. Only now are inter-sibling violence, ‘granny-bashing’ and husband battering beginning to be seen as problems (see Steinmetz, 1977; 1978). Social problems are more than just an objective state of affairs. They require interpretation and entrepreneurial activity before we hear of them and before they acquire meaning — or a meaning of sorts (Fuller and Myers, 1941). Putative solutions to social problems are integrally related to the definitions of those problems which have been constructed and to the questions which have been posed about them.